"The Quaintness of the Past"

"The Quaintness of the Past"

Click the arrow on the audio player to hear Billy Collins read this poem. You can also download the recording or subscribe to Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes..

I turn the page of a magazineand find a black-and-white photograph of a roadhouse taken in the 1950s,an old clapboard affairwith a car of that vintage,maybe a Plymouth, parked in front.

It is almost enough to inspire me to take a snapshot of something around herefirst thing in the morning, maybe the little bakery down the streetwhere I often go for coffee and a muffinand the big city paperand the French girls behind the counter.

Ideallythere would be a few modern carsparked in front,then all I would have to do is walk back home and wait 50 or 100 yearsfor the photograph to become a thing of interest and value.

Of course, I will be long gone by thenand time will have marched on,though I never think of time as marchingdown a football field blowing a trumpetor into a city squarewith a rifle on its shoulder.

I picture time advancing more slowly up a mountain, leaving all the moments of history behindlike climbers who have to leave behindone of their companions on a cold glacial slope.

And sometimes, decades later,the body is discovered,the ice is chipped away, and we get to see a photograph of the remains—the bones of the hands arthriticallyfisted up, the jaw locked tight, a skull wearing a woolen cap,the man quaintly smiling out at us from the pastbefore we wet a finger and turn the page.

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Billy Collins's ninth collection of poems, Horoscopes for the Dead, will be published in March. He is a distinguished professor of English at Lehman College (CUNY) and a distinguished fellow of the Winter Park Institute of Rollins College.

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